A seminal work of dystopian fiction that foreshadowed the worst excesses of Soviet Russia, Yevgeny Zamyatin\u27s We is a powerfully inventive vision that has influenced writers from George Orwell to Ayn Rand.
In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful \u27Benefactor\u27, the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel and was the forerunner of works such as George Orwell\u27s 1984 and Aldous Huxley\u27s Brave New World . It was suppressed for many years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, yet is also a powerful, exciting and vivid work of science fiction.
Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a naval engineer by profession and writer by vocation, who made himself an enemy of the Tsarist government by being a Bolshevik, and an enemy of the Soviet government by insisting that human beings have absolute creative freedom. He wrote short stories, plays and essays, but his masterpiece is We , written in 1920-21 and soon thereafter translated into most of the languages of the world. It first appeared in Russia only in 1988.
This edition is translated from the Russian with a foreword by Greagory Zilboorg, an introduction by Peter Rudy, and a preface by Marc Slonim
